Crime & punishment > Notes of conversations with H. M'Donald, N. Sutherland, and H. M'Intosh, (who were executed at Edinburgh, April 22, 1812,) during the time they were under sentence of death

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I shall only here add two or three sentences,
which I found written on loose pieces of paper
lying on the table before them. They were all
in Sutherland’s handwriting. “ Hear, O Lord !
the cry of the prisoner, and be merciful to them
who are appointed to die. Oh ! that my head
were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears,
that I might weep day and night.”—On another
paper were these lines:—
“ I once had a heart that would never melt,
When I thought upon sorrow and woe;
But now when I look to my Saviour who bled,
It pierces my heart through and through.”
I found also the following sentence: “ What
do these sounding bells mean by their mournful
voice ! Why do they strike their murderer so,
and wound him to the heart!” Sutherland
told me, he wrote this, as expressive of his feel¬
ings on hearing the clock strike, when he thought
how fast his time was passing away, and reflect¬
ed how much he had formerly abused it—Every
reader, of the smallest degree of sensibility, will
be easily able to conceive what he must have felt
in the very affecting circumstances in which these
youngmenwere thenplaced. I oftenfoundsimilar
feelings powerfully awakened in my own mind,
, while sitting by them at the time that the stroke
upon the bell announced that another hour was
gone of the few they were permitted to remain
on earth. May this view of the value of time,
when our hours on earth are drawing to a close.